NRT-IGE: PhD Career Ladder Program: A grassroots approach to career development

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Stony Brook University's PhD Career Ladder Program, developed by graduate students, for graduate students, serves as a nimble and cost-effective national model for PhD career development and exploration. The traditional career pathway for PhD students in the sciences, leading to a faculty job, is no longer reliable. Numerous recent reports have called on universities to provide better career development and preparation to help these highly-trained scientists and engineers go on to productive and satisfying careers in a broader range of job sectors. To create the necessary culture change and provide these resources, institutions need cost-effective, easily adaptable models that can transform from the bottom up. The PhD Career Ladder Program is a student-led career mentoring program that takes students through an eight-step curriculum of self-assessment, career exploration and preparation for a job search. Because the program is grassroots and peer-to-peer, it creates a supportive space for exploration of career paths inside and outside of academia and encourages persistence toward students' career goals. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award in the Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) Track to Stony Brook University will focus on expanding, improving and institutionalizing the PhD Career Ladder Program, and testing its effectiveness as a career development tool.This award will allow Stony Brook to expand the existing PhD Career Ladder Program (PCLP) to new cohorts and develop standardized training for new peer leaders. The success of PCLP will be assessed through evaluation of its impact on participants as well as the effectiveness of its programmatic elements. Key measures include increasing student career knowledge and skills, enhancing students' confidence in their career prospects, transferable skills and job-search skills, broadening students? career horizons to include the pursuit of careers beyond academia, and cultivating a pipeline of new student leaders. The assessment also will measure research-grounded psychosocial variables such as shifts in scientific identity and perceived identity compatibility with diverse career pathways. The program, including the new train-the-trainers component and the expansion of PCLP to new student cohorts, will be assessed formatively throughout the project as well as summatively at the end of the project. Finally, findings on this highly adaptable and cost-effective model will be disseminated broadly, through an online clearinghouse of archived material and a program implementation toolkit.The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The Innovations in Graduate Education Track is dedicated solely to piloting, testing, and evaluating novel, innovative, and potentially transformative approaches to graduate education.